Common ground

Air of danger

The Doldrums, the strip-zones of low pressure which roam equatorial seas, are notorious for their punishing tranquillity. Silver water basking under blue skies; painted ship, painted ocean. As sailors have long known, though, the Doldrums are also given to violence. Squall lines sweep suddenly across them. Hot water makes hot, wet air, which rises in fierce up-draughts, before thickening and braiding into typhoons and tornadoes.

In his aeronautical masterpiece, Wind, Sand and Stars (1939), Antoine Saint-Exupéry describes the first seaplane crossing of the South Atlantic, made by his friend Jean Mermoz in May 1930. When Mermoz reached the Doldrums, they were in a turbulent mood:

"Waterspouts stood in apparently motionless ranks like the pillars of a temple. On their swollen capitals rested the dark and lowering arch of the storm, but blades of light sliced down through cracks in the arch, and between the pillars the full moon gleamed on the cold stone tiles of the sea. Mermoz made his way through those empty ruins, banking for four hours from one channel of light to another, circling round those giant pillars with the sea surging up inside them, following those flows of moonlight towards the exit from the temple."

Saint-Exupéry's writings, the finest in aerology - among the finest in all exploration - are full of moments such as these: moments when, aloft, one suddenly "passes beyond the borders of the real world", and into a realm so elemental that it seems otherworldly.

In Night Flight (1931), Southern Mail (1929), and Flight to Arras (1942), he writes of crash-landings in the "mineral country" of the desert, of long journeys in darkness over sea and sand, of crossing high mountain passes while "sprays of lightning" illuminate the peaks. He writes, too, of miracles; of how, on a night-flight south, a pilot will move through seasons in a matter of hours, "leaving behind the rains and snows of the North, repudiating winter, he throttles back his engine and begins his descent through a midsummer sky into the dazzling sunlight of Alicante".

No one has written about air like Saint-Exupéry. Air was a substance whose beauty so astonished him that he often lapsed into dream-like states while at the controls: the aeroplanes he was flying did not have autopilot. "I live", he once wrote, "in the realm of flight".

Saint-Exupéry, or Saint-Ex as he was widely known, learnt his trade as a pilot while working for Latécoère, the company which in the late 1910s opened up the first air routes into Africa and South America. The Latécoère pilots were not today's stern men of gold braid and flight-bag, shuttling between the duty-free zones of the world's cities. They were a clerisy of risk-takers, a young aerial aristocracy. Men like Mermoz pushed their planes far above their operational ceilings. When they returned, "it was only to set out again". Saint-Ex began by venerating these men, then he became one of them.

With Latécoère, Saint-Ex flew some of the most hazardous early mail routes over the Mediterranean, the Sahara and the Andes. During these years, he encountered the two elemental trinities - "wind, sand and stars", "mountain, sea and storm" - which he would worship for the rest of his life. And he came to understand that he was a man who found himself by getting lost. Flying, radioless, with limited fuel, above desert or ocean expanses, was his preferred state. He felt most at home in "a remoteness beyond possibility of homecoming".

It is extraordinary that Saint-Ex lived as long as he did. He describes once piloting over the lightless Libyan desert for hours on a clouded night. Glimpsing "the gleam of water at the bottom of a crevasse in the fog", he realises that he has been flying mistakenly over open sea - a navigational error which almost kills him. On another occasion, he and a navigator crash-land in the Libyan desert and, against all odds, walk to safety. They pass on foot through a vast area of dunes which are covered "with a single layer of shining black pebbles". "It is", wrote Saint-Ex, "as if we are walking on scales of metal, and all the domes around us shine like armour. We have fallen into a metallic world. We are locked in an iron landscape."

On another occasion, piloting a seaplane through stormy air far above water, he notices the "great white palm leaves which seem to cover the sea's surface, marked with veins and flaws and petrified in a kind of frost". It is an exquisite sight, but Saint-Ex knows that this is "no place to put down," for the frost is in fact the sign of turbulent water seen from altitude: not "beautiful palm leaves" at all, but "poisonous flowers".

In Saint-Ex's writing, we are always seeing down on to the world, and reinterpreting it as a consequence. "A person taking off from the ground," he once remarked, "elevates himself above the trivialities of life into a new understanding." The Greeks had a name for the person who saw from above. They called him the katascopos - a word which later came to mean spy, or explorer - and for them, the sight gained from height was close to god-like. Saint-Ex was a katascopos in every sense of the word, and to read his prose - terse, epigrammatic, visionary - is to share in some part that salutary aerial view, that fresh cosmic perspective.

"We are living on a wandering planet", he beautifully observed. "From time to time, thanks to the aeroplane, it reveals to us its origin: a lake connected with the moon unveils hidden kinships. I have seen other signs of this." This idea of connection - an idea that was both environmentalist and humanist in its implications - joins all of Saint-Ex's writing, right through to his mystical work, Citadelle, unfinished at the time of his death (he died as he dreamed, disappearing in July 1944 during a reconnaissance flight over the Mediterranean). Up in his sky-lab, Saint-Ex developed a socialist version of heroism: a belief - in the words of his best English translator - William Rees, that "human solidarity was the only true wealth in life, mutual responsibility the only ethic".

This ideal was deeply involved, for Saint-Ex, with the view from above - the aeronaut's vision. In the short, exquisite prologue to Wind, Sand and Stars, he described his first night flight in Argentina:

"It was a dark night, with only occasional scattered lights glittering like stars on the plain. Each one, in that ocean of shadows, was a sign of the miracle of consciousness. In one home, people were reading, or thinking, or sharing confidences. In another, perhaps, they were searching through space, wearying themselves with the mathematics of the Andromeda nebula. In another they were making love. These small flames shone far apart in the landscape, demanding their fuel. Each one, in that ocean of shadows, was a sign of the miracle of consciousness ... the flame of the poet, the teacher, or the carpenter. But among these living stars, how many closed windows, how many extinct stars, how many sleeping men ..."

"We must", Saint-Ex concluded, "surely seek unity. We must surely seek to communicate with some of those fires burning far apart in the landscape."

About this article

Robert Macfarlane on Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's flight writings

This article appeared on p35 of the Guardian review section of the Guardian
on Friday 22 April 2005.
It was published on
the Guardian website
at 10.41 EDT on Saturday 23 April 2005.
It was last modified at 07.42 EDT on Tuesday 29 June 2010.
It was first published at 10.41 EDT on Thursday 11 August 2005.